Page 13 - Beta Field News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley said a broken pipeline connected to an offshore oil platform known as Elly caused the spill.

Off shore. it's not exactly around that platform. we actually jumped a little bit further. let me go back and show you where this is because this is important. there's an area called the beta field. the beta field is land that is owned by the u.s. department of the interior. it is then leased by these oil company. you will be able to see them here. sorry we got a little far head of ourselves. you will get an idea here. not sure we're coming back to the same graphic. there is a pipeline that runs directly towards shore from this platform. somewhere along the line we had ourselves a break, a bre...

Notice the boxed area offshore. this is the beta field. it's in federal waters. you get closer to shore and it's state waters. sit owned by u.s. department of the interior. this land is a huge reservoir for crude oil and it is then leased to these companies, such as beta operating company. elly is the main platform that does the most processing. the other platforms, extract crude, give it to elly. elly criss-crosses and is more to the left. so somewhere along this line, we're not exactly sure where. we thought maybe five miles offshore. wherever it is, it started to leak. they put a temporary ...

Were smelling gasoline fume. we hear right now it's overwhelming. the reason for that, this is not raw crude that we saw getting extracted in the bp oil spill. this is mainly a post-pro duck oil and gas, so a lot of chemicals are added to it and therefore the fumes will be oppressive to the nose but makes it less dense so the sheen was first notified or noticed about 9:00 a.m. on saturday morning from the u.s. coast guard. you can see we have long beach to the far north left-hand corner. laguna beach is just off the screen to the east. we have a platform out here, actually four platforms, in a...

Anything that gets pushed onshore will be pushed a little bit further inland. you can look at history, they've had a list of problems in this beta field. they've been fined before for corroded pipes and things of that nature. in 1969, this was the worst, santa bar bra spill, 3 million, the worst until the exxon valdez and then bp again. a history of problems. you know they're going to be talking about this in more depth not only in southern california but you'll probably hear about it on capitol hill this week as well. >> that was a lot of great information, the scariest among them this will e...